Why do investments in influencer marketing lack behind the intentions?

Why do investments in influencer marketing lack behind the intentions?

Posted by Dennis Doerfl

In 2015, Forrester announced that over 73% of all marketers have allocated budget for influencer marketing and since then, the trend has skyrocketed. Just recently, Salesforce Research released their report in which nearly two-thirds of the marketers planned on increasing their budgets for social advertising, with 54% having used influencer marketing in 2016, and additional 18% planning on introducing it in the next 12 months. These figures are far from surprising, given that between 66% and 80% of all marketers judge influencer marketing to be very effective and amongst the best digital marketing strategies available.

Yet, another trend also stands out and it’s the companies’ hesitation to out more money in influencer marketing. If two-thirds of all marketers believe in the superiority of influencer marketing, how come that only half of them actually plan for it in their advertising budgets?

Influencer marketing can bring benefits such as greater engagement than any other form of marketing, up to 11 times higher ROI than traditional advertising (TapInfluence study with Nielsen Catalina Solutions, 2016), greater media value, and even create new positions such as social media managers and strategists which boost the economy. Still, investments are lacking especially compared to other forms of classical or digital marketing.

Based on a series of influencer marketing campaigns they ran for an array of companies in different industries, both start-ups and fortune 500, global and locally-based in Europe and the US, Fourstarzz concluded that they all had one thing in common. Marketers were more than willing to invest in influencer marketing but they lacked the concrete action plan necessary to yield situation-specific benefits.

The core issue is perhaps the availability of great tools and databases that provide influencer-related information. Big Data is an invaluable source of information but can also be overwhelming, especially to someone who doesn’t possess the skills and knowledge to transform statistics into an industry- and business-specific plan for action. Data is only good if marketers can make sense of it and someone who can translate the numbers into an action plan supporting a specific goal such as “I want to convert 10,000 new app users through influencer marketing” can completely transform the world of influencer marketing.

To encourage marketers to branch further into influencer marketing, someone needs to transform the wealth of available data on social media influencers into an easily digestible output which will encourage marketers to branch further into influencer marketing. Companies such as Fourstarzz invest in tools and features that will transform the Big Data into actionable plans, supported by clear statistics such as ROI. Influencer marketing holds an array of advantages but to match intentions with investments, we need big data driven handholding.